Biographer Isaacson describes the man who co-founded Apple and later made it the most valuable brand in the world. Excerpt from the program on December 14, 2011.

WALTER ISSACSON, CEO, the Aspen Institute, Former Chairman and CEO, CNN; Former Editor, Time; Author, Steve Jobs

ADAM LASHINSKY, Senior Editor at Large, Fortune Magazine; Author, Inside Apple – Moderator

 

LASHINSKY: In your previous interviews, you have described Steve as petulant. My observation on that is that when my five-year-old daughter refuses to put on her shoes before going to school, she’s being petulant.

ISAACSON: There’s a big difference.

LASHINSKY: You do not describe a petulant man in this book.

ISAACSON: He had a passion, a petulance, an impatience. I do think it was connected to the artist sensibility that wanted to really make insanely great products. And he was kind of binary. Either something was insanely great, or it totally sucked, and nothing in between. I do think that that leads you to be brittle, rather impatient, sometimes brusque. Somebody just walked up to me and said, “I work at Apple, and I sort of met Steve Jobs. He cut in front of me in the café to grab some food.” I said, “Did he say ‘I’m sorry’?” He said, “No.”

But that’s Steve. You can’t separate that from the fact that he was a total genius; he made awesome products; and I hope the narrative of the book is that you’ll look at a guy who admits to being really tough, rough on people, a jerk at times, but as it goes along, he develops and inspires a team that becomes incredibly loyal to him and, over and over again – whether it’s the Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad – just makes awesomely great products. You can’t separate the personality from the perfectionism, the passion, that made these products.

LASHINSKY: Cutting in line in front of somebody in the cafeteria is not nice. It’s repugnant behavior; it’s the kind of behavior we teach our children not to do, and in your book, you have far stronger anecdotes. Telling his PR woman, at midnight, after she’s gone out to find him the kind of flowers that he wants –

ISAACSON: Cala lilies –

LASHINSKY: – that she looks like s--t. That is just not admirable behavior.

ISAACSON: If you were listing the 1,000 adjectives for Steve, nice would not be [one of them]. Kindness would not be up there. I told him, “Why are you that way, Steve?” and he said, “This is who I am. This is the way I am.” People say, “Well, he didn’t put a license plate on there. He sometimes parked in the handicapped [spot], or he cut in line.” He actually seemed to live as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him.

That’s not what you want to teach your six-year-old – or, for that matter, my 21-year-old – but it also leads you to be the type of person you can celebrate, and “here’s to the misfits, the crazy ones, those who” – you know, the “Think Different” ad – and if you believe the rules don’t apply to you, sometimes you’re able to bend reality. You’re very nice; I’m pretty nice, at times. I would never have been able to make the iPad. So you’ve got to just live with the whole package there. I’m not defending being not nice. I’m just saying, I could have sugar coated it. You’ve written in the Fortune stories anecdotes that are just as bad. You don’t want to sugar coat a book; you want it to be brutally honest.

I’d say, “Why are you this way to people?” And he’d say, “I’m brutally honest, because the price of admission to being in the room with me is, I get to tell you you’re full of shit if you’re full of s--t, and you get to say to me I’m full of s--t, and we have some rip-roaring fights and that keeps the B players, the bozos, from larding the organization. Only the A players survive.” The people who do survive say, “Yeah, he was rough.” They say things even worse than “He cut in line in front of me,” but they say, “This was the greatest ride I’ve ever had, and I would not give it up for anything.” So you’ve got to see both sides. Some people say, “You know, it’s really bad; he cuts in line,” or “He doesn’t have a license plate.” I say, “Wait a minute; we’re living in a world where people intentionally made collateralized debt obligations with junk in it that destroyed people’s earnings, and they still get celebrated.” This is not evil; this is just being a tough, petulant person. If you want real evil, there are people in this world who still get on the cover of Fortune magazine, who really do bad things.

LASHINSKY: Fair enough. We’re not even… I shouldn’t have agreed to that so readily.

ISAACSON: Not you; you’ve never been on the cover.

LASHINSKY: I’m not focused on the cover subjects of Fortune other than Steve Jobs, for the moment. I don’t think there’s any question that we admire Steve Jobs and Apple for what he accomplished and what the company accomplishes, but the question is, Should we – and do you, as his biographer – admire him for this side of him that is… I want to say “not admirable,” but that’s the question I’m asking you. Being hurtful to people for no apparent reason is different from being tough in a business meeting about the quality of your ideas.

ISAACSON: Well, if you ask if I admire it, no. Do I think it’s necessary to be a good boss? No. Is my book supposed to be a handbook or a how-to book on how to be a good boss? No. That’s your book. Mine is just a biography. He once said to your editor, Andy Serwer at Fortune, and John Huey, when he was trying to kill a story that you may have worked on at Fortune – about his cancer treatment and everything else, he finally said, “What do you have in the story?” and Serwer told him, “It’s in the book,” and finally he said, “So, wait a minute. You’ve discovered that I’m an a--hole? Why is that news?” He was self-aware; he was tough.

I say in the very beginning, in the introduction, [that] he’s not a saint [or] a package for emulation, but he’s a true genius who was able to connect creativity to technology; create a team that he drove like crazy, and those who were part of that team became loyal and incredibly good. He took a company 90 days away from bankruptcy in 1997, and by the day he retired it was the most valuable company on Earth. He also cut in front of people in the cafeteria a lot. Don’t cut in front of people. And by the way, if you get a chance to make the most valuable company on Earth, do that too.

LASHINSKY: One last pass at a similar topic – and then I’ll move on. Do you think that he imprinted this element of his personality onto the company? Apple has a reputation for roughing up its partners, its suppliers, even its customers from time to time – so clearly this has been successful. So should we admire them as a company for this when they behave badly the way he behaved badly, and will it last?

ISAACSON: I’m not sure. I won’t accept the premise that Apple is a bad company. Over the years, from Microsoft and AT&T on, [companies] have all run afoul with the Justice Department and anti-trust [laws].

I do think he’s actually created a company [whose] main signature is that the people there care about product more than profit, and they care about connecting the humanities – the beauty and design – to technology and engineering.

On the last day at Apple for Steve Jobs, he goes into the boardroom to turn in his resignation as CEO. It’s a pretty moving scene. He’s quite ill at that point, and at one point somebody on the board starts joking about Hewlett Packard, and how HP had gotten out of the tablet business that day, and was messing up the personal computer line business, didn’t know what they were doing. Steve says, “Wait a minute; let’s not joke about that. Bill Hewlett gave me my first job when I was 13 growing up in the Valley, and he and David Packard thought they had made a company that would last for generations. They made a company that wasn’t just making oscillators or instruments or then calculators, or then computers; they were making a company that would keep making great products, generation after generation. And those bozos there screwed it up. That is what we don’t want to have happen at Apple.”

At Apple, you have ingrained in the DNA not just being tough on suppliers, but driving engineering to make a product as insanely great as it can be. I love Amazon, for example. I order my clothing from Amazon. But they didn’t go insanely great when they made the Kindle Fire. They didn’t sit the way Johnny Ive and Tim Cook and Phil Schiller and Scott Forrester would do, over and over again, saying, “No; we have to start over; the curve is not perfect; this button isn’t exactly right.” We live in a country in which people sometimes cut corners, believe it or not.

LASHINSKY: Did he have a vision of how well the company would do without him, and what’s your opinion of how well the company will do without him?

ISAACSON: Well, actually, I mean, your opinion’s more important, since you’re writing [the] future, and I’m just a biographer. Steve does have a bit of a magical way of thinking; I mean, he feels he can bend reality to his desire. I think he thought he was going to outrun the cancer. He had done so for eight years; he had targeted therapy after targeted therapy; and I think even this summer, he said, “There’ll be more; I’ll get to the next lily pad; I’ll outrun the cancer.”

LASHINSKY: He used that expression, “lily pad”?

ISAACSON: Lily pad. He even said to me, on our last meeting – he was very ill, and resting – after awhile he looked up at me and he said, “There are going to be parts of your book I don’t like,” and it was more a question than just a statement. I said, “Yeah.” I was kind of looking forward to engaging him. He said, “Well, don’t worry; I wanted an independent book. I didn’t want it to feel like an in-house book. But I’m not going to read it for a year. I’ll read it a year from now.”

His way of magical thinking is so extraordinary that I remember sort of smiling, and thinking, “OK, that means he will get to the next lily pad. He will be around for another year, two years, three years.” He had a way of making you believe, and most of the time it worked, starting at Atari when he told Steve Wozniak, “You can make this in four days,” when they were doing Breakout [for] one of the video games. Woz said, “No, this is going to take four weeks,” and Steve said, “No, no, no. You can do it in four days.” Woz said, “Well, that was a reality distortion field, and I did it in four days.”

Wendell Weeks, who runs Corning Glass, [is] a really great CEO. Steve Jobs, when he does the iPhone, decides he doesn’t want plastic; he wants really tough glass on it. They don’t make a glass that can be tough like they want. Finally somebody says to him – 'cause they were making all the glass in China for the fronts of the stores – says, “You oughta check with the people at Corning. They’re kinda smart there.” So he flies to Corning, New York. He sits there in front of the CEO, Wendell Weeks, and says, “This is what I want: a glass that can do this.” Weeks says, “You know, we once created a type of process.” They created something called “Gorilla Glass.” Steve said, “No. Here’s how you make really strong glass,” and Wendell says, “Wait a minute. I know how to make glass. Shut up, and listen to me.” Steve, to his credit, shuts up and listens, and Wendell Weeks describes the process that makes Gorilla Glass, and Steve then says, “Fine. In six months, I want enough of it to make” – whatever it is – “a million iPhones.”

Wendell says, “I’m sorry; we’ve actually never made it; we don’t have a factory to make it; this was a process we developed, but we never had a manufacturing plan to do it.” Steve looks at him and says what he said to Woz 20, 30 years earlier: “Don’t be afraid. You can do it.” I flew to Corning, because I just wanted to hear this story; Wendell Weeks tells me, “I just sat there and looked at the guy. He kept saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. You can do this.’” Weeks said he called his plant in Kentucky that was making glass for LCD screens, and said, “Start the process now, and make Gorilla Glass.” That’s why every iPhone in your pocket, and every iPad, has gorilla glass made by Corning. This is the reality distortion field that is part and parcel of a guy who doesn’t believe the rules apply to him, even the rule about never cut in line.

LASHINSKY: Of course, Corning uses this in their marketing now. They market Gorilla Glass for other customers.

You crystallized something for me about entrepreneurs, which is that they ask people to help them do things that no one else thought could be done. I heard that Henry Luce once heard that the Donnelley Plant in Chicago could do color printing, only nobody was doing color printing [of interior pages] for magazines. I think it was when he wanted to start Life; it wasn’t for Time originally. They said, “No, no. We can’t do that.” He said, “Yes, you can. We’re going to do it very soon,” and they did it.

ISAACSON: Right. It’s the epigram of my book. There was a line at the end of the 1997 “Think Different” ad. In fact, at the funeral his daughter read it, the “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels,” and the last line is “and those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” And that’s what Steve Jobs was.

LASHINSKY: One of the audience questions is, Did he discuss with you what he intended to do with his wealth beyond give it to his family?

ISAACSON: No. I’ve asked, and that was the one thing I couldn’t crack. I don’t know what he did philanthropically – what he did was not public. I think it’s quoted that he was not exactly praiseworthy of people who talked a whole lot about philanthropy and said, “I think it’ll leverage philanthropy to do other things,” or Bill Gates’s giving pledge. When Bill Gates was calling him to do it, he said, “Naw. I’m not going to do that.”

LASHINSKY: Did he ever comment on Gates’s career shift into philanthropy?

ISAACSON: He said, “He’s much happier in philanthropy, because he didn’t care that much about making great products.” Steve actually liked Bill Gates, in a way, and respected Bill Gates. An essence of Steve Jobs is that you would do a head snap three or four times an hour when he would say something brutally honest. It wasn’t like he didn’t like Bill Gates; he would just say what he really thought, which is, “Bill Gates is better at philanthropy; he never cared about making great products.” That’s unfair; I think Microsoft has made great products, but Microsoft and Bill Gates never had the artistic passion, the desire to make it so beautiful, to link the humanities and technology the way that Steve was driven.

LASHINSKY: Is there an anecdote you can share about the Apple organization after Jobs that highlights your belief that the distance between Apple and its competitors is sustainable?

ISAACSON: I do think that he has put a top-notch team in place, and I do think that he did not try to replace himself by saying, “Who’s the next Steve Jobs?” Tim Cook, as you know, is not at all like Steve Jobs, but he’s an awesomely good CEO with a totally different manner. But when you connect him to Johnny Ive, who is the greatest industrial designer of our era, and to people like Scott Forrester, who’s great with the mobile operating system software, and Eddie Q., who’s great with the content stuff, and Phil Schiller and many others, you have a team that seems to me – and I don’t play the stock market, but – that seems to me that it can continue with multiple people the vision that Steve had.